The Hawk-Eye Couldn’t of Helped Serena

Posted by Dan in EQUIPMENT, STADIUM on 09-17-09    No Comments


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Hawk Eye at work.By now you have probably heard all about Serena Williams meltdown at the US Open on a foot fault at the US Open.  We we wondering about why the vaunted Hawk-Eye system that watches the balls on the lines wasn’t called in to see if her foot was over the line?  I looked into it to see exactly how the Hawk-Eye system actually worked and it tuns out that Hawk-Eye is looking for foot faults but it watching everything else. 

The Hawk-Eye Officiating System made its debut fortnight at the 2007 Wimbledon Championships. It uses 6 or more high speed cameras.  First it works in 2D on the XY access, vision processing is used to identify the center of the ball within each frame of each camera. Camera movement is compensated for by also tracking the lines of the court. Second, it adds a third axis for 3D, the system triangulates the information from each calibrated camera to provide the 3D position of the ball. Third, they add trajectory as another axis. This process is repeated for each frame so that the 3D positions of the ball can be combined to produce a single trajectory of the flight of the ball.

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